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Author: Chris Ladd

It’s been a great run at the Chronicle. After more than seven years writing here it’s time to say goodbye to the GOPLifer blog. I’ve been engaged in Republican grassroots politics since the Reagan years, but Donald Trump’s nomination was a step too far. After the convention I resigned my precinct chair and left the GOP, as explained in the letter I sent to our local chairman. More detail and some history are explained over at the old GOPLifer blog. …

Facts are always elusive in politics, but they remain unalterable and non-negotiable. They may be misrepresented, distorted, or suppressed, but they never go away. Lies are fast and facts are slow, but what we borrow in the space between deception and reckoning will always be repaid with terrible interest. The Republican Party chose to embrace an entire platform of fiction to protect an unstable coalition too brittle to bend and too dear to abandon. Simply put, our modern Republican alignment comes from our effort to recruit white supremacists. Our dissociation from the world of empirical reality rises from the ideology we adopted to obscure that compromise. …

Trump is merely a step in a natural progression. If not him it would have been someone else. Defeat him this year without confronting the racism that fueled his campaign and we’ll just keep fighting the same monster again and again with different haircuts. Thanks to our colorblindness, racism acts like dark matter in our political universe, perverting policy outcomes in ways we find impossible to understand. As long as we tolerate systemic racism the prosperity, freedom, and success we would otherwise deserve will remain elusive. …

Freedoms we enjoy under an elected, representative government are accompanied by an ironic curse – We will always have the government that we deserve. Sometimes we invite disasters with our choices. Flint’s voters ran the city into the ground, and now their children are living with the poisonous consequences. Unless we learn to adapt to the demands of this new economic environment, more disasters will follow on a grander and grander scale. Flint is a warning shot. …

Why do officers in Chicago and other big cities enjoy this degree of immunity while public servants in the South do not? Southern states never developed powerful public employee unions. In the North, unions deliver enough of the political ground game to elect the public officials who will subsequently be on the “other side” of contract negotiations. And state laws force local governments to reach agreements with those unions, effectively blocking any escape. The Democratic Party to which black voters owe unquestioned loyalty is controlled by unions that will always place their own interests above black voters. Checkmate. …

Single-party Democratic rule in Texas is finished, taking all of our excuses with it. If Republicans are really Republicans, rather than Dixiecratic refugees from the Civil Rights Era, then they will end this spiteful tradition. When the Legislature is seated again next January, surely we can expect to see this state holiday moved to a more appropriate setting and context. …

Social, economic and political forces too big for us to recognize processed our identity and nudged us toward the place we belonged: Elmhurst. For us, a well-educated, middle-income young white family with a promising future, that machine served our interests better than we could have imagined. It does not operate in such a benevolent fashion for everyone. …

White Americans, especially those dependent on disappearing blue-collar jobs for their livelihood are not voting against their interests when they respond to racially-tinged populist appeals. Until we understand the concrete, structural significance of white supremacy to our economy and our political order we will continue to be baffled by the behavior of millions of influential white voters. …

For two centuries, America stunted economic tensions by channeling the frustrations of lower-income voters into racial discrimination. To varying degrees around the country a myth of white racial solidarity formed the core of a common American identity. Remove the dignity and privilege that has always accompanied a white identity in America you will have to replace it with something – quickly. In a morally complex sense, less advantaged white Americans have a valid point about the unfairness of this emerging order. They are, in a very tangible way, writing the check that pays for a more just and prosperous society for everyone else. …

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